2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper discusses the preliminary findings of a scoping literature review on non-majority students’ sense of belonging in engineering and computing education, focused on barriers, supports, and contexts. A substantial body of research underscores the significant impact of sense of belonging on students’ educational, social, and psychological outcomes, particularly for non-majority students in engineering and computing education who often experience isolation, which in turn impacts their decisions to leave their fields of study. Consequently, sense of belonging research has become more prevalent in engineering and computing education to challenge racial and socioeconomic disparities, leading to a recent surge of interest and publications in the field.

Despite the clear importance of a sense of belonging, and the increasing attention to this topic, non-majority students still face significant difficulties in cultivating a sense of belonging to their community, field of study, and institution. A viable first step in bridging this gap is to comprehensively map the existing literature on non-majority students' sense of belonging, focusing on common needs and barriers, as well as identifying any differences that may exist between student populations, which this study aims to address.

Our team has been conducting synthesis research project on sense of belonging in engineering and computing education, and a portion of the data collected for the larger project will be used for the current scoping review. A scoping review was considered an appropriate method for this study, as the goal of this research is to report the current state of the literature, as opposed to synthesizing forms of practice or areas of future research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines for scoping reviews, we are currently screening abstracts of our gathered literature from five selected academic databases (Web of Science, Engineering Village, ERIC, Academic Search Complete, and APA PsychINFO) using Boolean search strings. The full paper will present preliminary findings from full-text screening, offering a more comprehensive understanding of what hinders or supports non-majority students’ sense of belonging and in which contexts these barriers or supports are impactful., This research will aid the community in better supporting non-majority students, who are especially vulnerable to a lack of sense of belonging.